Starting on Monday, 8 June I will be reading aloud 19 of my favourite poems over 19 days. Search you tube hugh biddell or go to the links below for the readings and a few thoughts on the 19 poems - beginning with:

Poem #1  This Lime Tree Bower My Prison by S.T. Coleridge. 

Where I am unable to read a poem online because it is still in copyright, I shall read it aloud to myself and my family and post the title online that day. Listen to the first poem on you tube below

https://youtu.be/cuklzj7yn0U

About The Reader

The Reader is a national charity that wants to bring about a reading revolution so that everyone can experience and enjoy great literature.  Through its "Shared Reading" with school groups, adults, looked after children, adults with physical/mental health conditions, people in care homes, and in criminal justice settings amongst others, The Reader helps to improve wellbeing, reduce isolation and build stronger communities. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has meant these face to face groups/activities have ceased but The Reader has adapted to meet the demand for meaningful social connection, reading with many groups across the UK online or by phone.  Where that is not possible, the charity has worked with old and new partners to provide free reading resources and activity packs, and continued to offer comfort, meaning and connection through great literature .   

During these difficult times, please donate to help The Reader as it continues to connect communities and help reduce isolation.

Quotes from lockdown

Shropshire volunteer Helen leads a Shared Reading Group that normally meets in a community centre every Monday. The group is made up of 8 different people of different ages, the oldest being 93. Helen said: ”Last week, having waited for the 93 year old to be set up with a laptop, we met up online to read a short poem together, and we ended up reading and talking for over an hour. There was great excitement at being able to speak to each other ‘in person’ as many of the group hadn’t been in touch with each other since lockdown began. The 93 year old phoned her son the following day to say how wonderful it had been: “as good as going out”.

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Poem #19  Sonnet 18 Shall I Compare Thee to a Sunny Day by William Shakespeare and also Exile's Letter by Ezra Pound

On a glorious sunny day, with Liverpool clinching the Premiership, this seemed the right choice for my last poem aloud. It speaks for itself. As the object of his love basks in the sunshine in full beauty, he reminds us that this fades and that his poem will be the only way that beauty lives on. 

I then read Exile's Letter by Ezra Pound. An all time favourite and a translation of a poem by Li Po. I love reading this aloud and regret not being able to do this here. From the formality of its opening in the form of a letter, the poem celebrates a long friendship cemented in the headlong youth of parties where they revelled in colour and music and animated discussions "we all spoke out our hearts and minds" "and my spirit so high it was all over the heavens" to the reflective separation and memories "there is no end of things in the heart.' And if you liked that try reading  Pound's To Em Mei's The Unmoving Cloud" with its wonderfully punchy opening "The clouds have gathered and gathered// And the rain falls and falls". So follow the link and         

https://youtu.be/mDUPO4pzYVM

Poem #18 Sonnet 19 - On his Blindness by John Milton and then Anything Can Happen by Seamus Heaney

Read https://www.thereader.org.uk/featured poem-on-his-blindness for more on this poem and Milton's (1608-1674) very personal message of survival and hope in a testing time. Try out other featured poems at 

And I also read aloud Seamus Heaney Anything can happen with its message during Covid 19. Such power to describe upheaval and change in huge forces beyond us

"...Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted

Those overlooked regarded..." 

Let us hope that the we take this opportunity to view things differently whether the homeless people now off the streets and  in hotels or the  Black Lives Matter Campaign 

Https://youtu.be/19VqnIYGg-s

Poem(s) #17 The Buried Life by Matthew Arnold and then The British by Benjamin Zephaniah 

A poem about “tracking out our true, original course and not living our lives in disguises or following other people’s tracks and he great feeling if we:

“...even for a moment, can get free 

Our heart” 

and not feel powerless to reveal our true thoughts and feelings. 

And following on from “the same heart beats in every human breast!” So my second poem is Benjamin Zephaniah’s The British  seeing us all as a blend stirred vigorously  “Note: all the ingredients are equally important...” 

https://youtu.be/OvNpG7PzXAQ

Poem #16 The Sick Rose by William Blake

As I get to the last 4 poems I am reading one older poem aloud, on you tube, and one newer poem aloud but unrecorded.

The illustration that goes with the poem shows a worm entering the heart of the rose and the simple image and direct, agonising feel of the poem are the reason for my choice. 

My other poem, related is Pablo Neruda's Sonnet  XVII 

"...I love you as one loves certain obscure things

secretly between the shadow and the soul"

and Robert Bly's translation of Pablo Naruda's Ode to a Watermelon.

http://youtu.be/wJhB9Cp96fw 

Poem #15 Chaucer by Ted Hughes

From his Birthday Letters, written over the course of 25 years starting after  the suicide of his former wife, Sylvia Plath In 1963. 

The energy and spirit of Plath declaiming Chaucer aloud to a field of cows and Hughesl’ and the cows reception. A message for us to occasionally throw caution to the wind and a poetry aloud moment:

“You were rapt. And the cows were enthralled.....

Ears angling to catch every inflection,

Keeping their awed six feet of reverence....”

To double up I read Epitaph for Fire and Flower by Plath where “stars shoot their petals, and suns run to seed” and Phaethon  from Ted Hughes’ Tales from Ovid about the consequences of Phaethon’ reactions to his friends mocking him.

Poem #14 Deniall by George Herbert

George Herbert (1593-1633) is a favourite of Jane Davis, the brilliant founder of The Reader. The poem is an embodiment for me of the favourite Reader quote “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world ,but then you read.It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” James Baldwin Life magazine

Here Herbert speaks of his relation to God but also speaks to everyone who is “like a brittle bow” stretched and taut, feeling that nobody is hearing them. The poem’s irregular shape and anguished feel brings him so close :

“My feeble spirit, unable to look right,

Like a nipt blossome, hung

                               Discontented.”

For the reading go to:

https://youtu.be/1CdK6OiBPqQ

Poem #13 Hermes of the Ways by Hilda Doolittle (HD)

Spare, laconic and with the images of Hermes the messenger god, moving between worlds, on the edge of dynamic sand dunes, the sea storms and the barely sheltered orchard with its twisted trees and too small apples that have been created by  "a desperate sun//That struggles through sea-mist":

"Wind rushes 

Over the dunes,

And the coarse, salt-crusted grass

Answers."

The start of the Imagist movement and for whom the word was first used. HD (1886-1961) was discovered and promoted by Pound. 

Poem #12 Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 by William Wordsworth

This poem is for all who love London. Written early in the morning in a mood of calm reflection, the City, steeped in the early morning sun, is seen as both calm and connected with one beating "mighty  heart". Vital  for our time.

His poem London, 1802 shows England  in need of less selfish men and those, like Milton, who on their heart the "lowliest duties didst lay" . For a  different view try London by William Blake with its "mind forg'd manacles". 

https://youtu.be/ugx-D7PpL9A 

Poem #11 The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

What a great start to the morning to read The Waste Land aloud again. One forgets the variety of its voices. I guess this morning in lockdown as 9 am approaches there is a vacant space where the  "crowd flowed over London Bridge". I have not read for copyright reasons but do listen to TS Eliot or Alec Guinness read it on You Tube (26mins) or read it yourself

The opening lines:

"April is the cruellest month, breeding 

 lilacs out of the dead land, mixing 

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.'

remind us of the pain of rebirth, coming out of mental anguish, and feeling stuck as the seasons go past us. That feeling that "the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief". The Reader has a role in that and as one member of a  shared reading group on The Wirral said to his psychiatrist:   

 "Actually it's the therapy of reading the books and going to the groups that's helped, not the drugs". He just laughed, as if to say "I know best". But I know it's really the reading groups that have helped me more than anything else - they are a different kind of medicine and it's through them that I've found a way back into life"     

Poem #10 If We Must Die by Claude McKay 

Written by Festus Claudius (Claude) McKay in July 1919 when white Americans were attacking and lynching in African American communities. He was a key figure in what was known as the Harlem Renaissance. A rallying cry, with the realism perhaps and pain of the Sorley poem, but valuing the ability to stand up for individual rights at whatever the cost and the right to die with honour, standing up against the "thousand blows" heaped on them. He looks at this as a moment for "kinsmen" to stand up and effectively oppose the forces of Colonialism and institutional racism; he uses the formal traditional structure Shakespearian sonnet which is interesting.   

Try also listening to his own readings of his poems and an excellent   audio on the Poetry Foundation site discussing the poem and a poem like  Subway Wind which I read aloud after and contrasts the suffocating subway with the soft free winds of Jamaica. I see a hint of Yeats' Lake Isle of Innisfree in this poem.  

https://youtu.be/bE1L7f_Pbj0    

Poem #9  Sonnet XXXIV - When you see Millions of the Mouthless Dead by Charles Hamilton Sorley

Sorley died aged 20 at the Battle of Loos and a number of his poems were in his kitbag. He was influential with Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The blunt directness of this poem on the finality of death speaks for itself, with its negation of the value of tears and honour to those who have died. "Say not soft things as other men have said"    

Sorley was at the same school as Sassoon, Marlborough College, and so for me there is a connection to my Great Uncle Ted Byrne who died in action just before the Somme and my Uncle Dick who died in Africa in WW2  and were, like me and a number of other family members, at the school. For a wondeful connected reading look up Christopher Ecclestone's reading of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est".

 https://youtu.be/hhuF-tNqVLw

Poem #8 Here in Katmandu by Donald Justice

This poem has such a wonderful tone of longing and searching for meaning. Justice is restless and finding it hard to adjust to the valley with its flowers "tremulous, ruddy with dew" but at the same time missing the mountains where 

"Blinded with snow

One knew what to do"

A sestina where the repetitions of words across the stanzas  help to accentuate the poet's feelings for the clarity of the mountains. I've read it aloud 3 times this morning but not on you tube as it is in copyright.

I spent a year off, teaching in Darjeeling, before going to Liverpool University and could see Kanchenjunga every clear day from the rooms I occupied at the school and as a boy loved reading early accounts of attempts to climb Everest. Why not  help support  The Reader by subscribing to the quarterly Reader magazine: I am currently reading one of its recommendations "Mountains of the Mind" by Robert Macfarlane  

Poem #7  The Ballad of Chevy Chase from the oral tradition. version written down c1430

Stirring oral ballad admired by Sir Philip Sidney and Ben Johnson with alliteration and rousing rhythm  that reminds us that poetry was not always written down. I remember my father reading this aloud at bedtime when I was about 7. Note verse XXXIII (33) where Percy will not yield to Douglas with its Macbeth hint:

“When I would never yielded be 

To man of woman born“

And a hint of Monty Python in verse L (50)

For Witherington my heart was woe

That ever he slain should be:

For when both his legs were hewn in two

Yet he kneel’d and fought on his knee.

Malory and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and of course Chaucer could be other reads. 

https://youtu.be/Qk31CqhJqYA

Poem #6  When You Are Old by W.B.Yeats

This reading is also for my wife, Sarah because she loves Yeats's (1865-1939) poetry (and not because of its last stanza!). 

The poem is featured in the A Little Aloud compendium by the Reader and it is often read in care home groups, many of whom talk about dreams and memories of doing something exciting and love the idea of the 'pilgrim soul'. The image of the journey of love in the William Carlos Williams poem #5 and the link to the poems by Donne and Marvell and  asking a current lover to look ahead to old age made me choose it here.   

 https://youtu.be/RNIGxAYHMgQ

Poem  #5  The Ivy Crown by William Carlos Williams

I could not possibly do this without reading from WCW (1833-1963). I urge you to read this aloud. It is about love, life and how love changes  “and fumbles in the dark”. Just the look of the poem on the page with its gaps and changes makes you think about the words images and connections: 

                  “  keep

                                      the briars out,

they say.

                     You cannot live

                                      and keep free of

briars.”

Couldn’t resist reading The Red Wheelbarrow aloud straight after it. 

Poem #4 The Good Morrow by John Donne

Today's poem is for Brian Nellist, a great friend of The Reader, who gave an inspiring talk on this poem when I went for an open day at Liverpool University; he made me want to read English there. So for those who can't go to an open day this year, my University friends, and the other lecturers such as Phil Davies and Miriam Allot. 

The tone of the poem, very much from the man's viewpoint, is fascinating, conversational, sometimes passionately wrapped up in his love "one little room an everywhere", sometimes wryly musing on but at the same time glossing over his/ their past. And Donne's (1571-1631) wonderful images - from the intimate - the lovers seeing themselves reflected in each others eyes  in the little room (bringing us back to wonder how far is he thinking of himself and his wishes rather than her?) to  the vast - sea-discoverers in new worlds. 

https://youtu.be/VCDimXmRxFg      

Poem #3  It might be lonelier without the loneliness by Emily Dickinson

All the uncertainty and "mights" in this poem and the paradoxes that are truth; ED (1830-1886) has become accustomed to her state, uncertain even to hope - with failure maybe easier, and darkness more comforting, than the pain of hope which might be even greater pressure. As her life went on ED became ever more a recluse and corresponded rather than going out.

https://youtu.be/R6QpY3rGRKA

Poem #2  Black Poet, White Critic by Dudley Randall followed by The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde 

Today I am reading two poems aloud: Dudley Randall's(1914-2000) "Black poet, white critic" from Cities Burning and Audre Lorde's (1934-1992) "The Black Unicorn".  I am reading to my family but I hope to encourage you to read them and learn more about both. Dudley Randall was key to developing an audience for Black poetry, publishing Lorde and others from his home and had the FBI's attention.In the first poem the simple calm clarity and beauty of the words belies the undertone of controversy and anger ending in the phrase "a white unicorn" . Lorde's poem begins "The black unicorn is greedy...." the tone is tough and uncompromising and the vocabulary and images urgent, impatient and unrelenting.

As  Audre Laude said "it is not difference which immobilises us, but silence"

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